Excuse Me, Your Liberal Propaganda is Showing

Ed 5 Comments

With every new television season, there are always sad farewells to favorite shows that have ended (Parks and Recreation, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation) and watching with anticipation the new crop of shows to see what will take the place of shows gone by. The new 2015-2016 season had many promising entries, but one is about to go by the wayside quickly because of one particularly troublesome theme.

The basic premise of “Quantico” seems interesting enough: a terrorist strike occurs in New York City and the prime suspect is someone from a class of FBI agent trainees that convened nine months earlier, specifically, Alex Parrish. The show switches between present time (after the terrorist strike) and the past (while the class takes place at Quantico).

Priyanka Chopra stars as Alex Parrish in

Priyanka Chopra stars as Alex Parrish in “Quantico.” Photo from abc.go.com.

I was going to give this show a shot, willing to overlook gratuitous sex scenes and sexual innuendo because I love a good mystery. However, there were two instances of the writers’ liberal leanings that I just can’t abide with and thus will remove the show from my DVR.

The first instance occurred in the show’s first episode, “Run.” One of the trainees, Eric Packer, is Mormon and the quick shots of his background show him attending his home temple and being an all-around nice guy. Nice, that is, until the trainees’ first assignment: to dig deeper into a fellow trainee’s background to find some information which was purposely omitted from their personnel files by the instructor. When the assignment is over and Eric’s secret is about to be revealed, he stresses so much about it that he pulls a gun and commits suicide in front of the entire class. The secret that Eric couldn’t bear to have the whole world know? He was on a mission trip in Africa and got a 14 year old girl pregnant; whom he subsequently took for a clandestine abortion from which the young girl died.

Liberal propaganda #1: pro-lifers are hypocrites who will resort to abortion when faced with a bad situation.

Liberal propaganda #2: women die from unsafe abortions around the world and that’s why we need to legalize abortion in developing countries.

I was ready to ignore that story as it wasn’t central to the plot and I figured it wouldn’t be mentioned again. But the very next week, in the show’s second episode, “America,” it happened again. The second instance occurred during a training exercise where the trainees had to look over three staged rooms that were based on supposedly real cases where terrorist acts were stopped by the FBI: an attempt on a senator’s life, bombing a public auditorium, and a suburban mom’s plan to burn down a Planned Parenthood where her daughter got an abortion.

Liberal propaganda #3: religious zealots (their words) want to bomb clinics to stop abortion.

As with most propaganda, there is always a little bit of truth hidden within. Yes, some pro-lifers have had abortions in their past, but overwhelming message of the pro-life movement is that there is forgiveness for those who have made this choice in their past. As for the third item, the pro-life movement abhors violence as a solution to the violence of abortion and thoroughly condemns those who take to bombings or shootings. For the writers to say that these were religious zealots, as opposed to plain old fanatics who have gone off the deep end, implies that those who oppose abortion on religious grounds are not the norm.

Episode 3, “Cover,” is on my DVR, but I think it’s time to distance myself from this show. Excuse me, but your liberal propaganda is showing, and that’s enough for me to stop watching.

Updated 10/16/2015

De-stigmatizing Abortion?

Ed

Over the years of speaking about abortion, I’ve learned that words have power and the person who can frame the words’ meanings often can control the conversation.  That’s why I prefer the term “pro-life” instead of “anti-abortion,” because I’m not just against abortion, I stand for the sanctity of human life at all stages of development and at all ages.

I’ve also used the term “pro-abortion” instead of “pro-choice” because, if we’re honest, the only choice that we’re talking about is the choice of abortion. But some people have tried to persuade me from using “pro-abortion” because they don’t really think people are for abortion, they’re just for “reproductive choice,” which would include abortion.

Not any more. There really are people who are pro-abortion and these people want to de-stigmatize it. Recently, The Washington Post ran an article about a new abortion clinic that opened in the Washington, D.C., area with the flippant tagline of: “Abortion. Yeah, we do that.”

The article states that “staff members plan to greet clients with warm teas, comfortable robes and a matter-of-fact attitude.” Well, even I would admit that is a welcome change from abortion clinics like Kermit Gosnell’s with outdated medical equipment; dirty, unsterilized medical instruments; and women being left to bleed-out in the recovery room. You can read a summary of the “House of Horrors” here and, in case you doubt it, the grand jury indictment can be downloaded here.

Let’s get something straight, an abortion ends a human life, no if’s, and’s, or but’s. It often involves tearing a human being limb by limb from what is supposed to be the safest place on Earth, the mother’s womb. In a time when everyone wants to be “transparent” and “informed consent” is the rule for any medical procedure, those who are pro-abortion now want to make you think abortion is a nice day at the spa where all your troubles will be washed away.

Those who are pro-abortion want to “be unapologetic” and make it seem “normal” to purposely “[end] a pregnancy” and that aborting a baby should be seen as “moral.” So here’s the latest attempt to de-stigmatize abortion and to make it seem normal while being unapologetic. Tell me what you think about this advertisement.

Personally, I think that treating abortion so flippantly is insulting to women and their intelligence. For years, the pro-choice folks have said that abortion isn’t a decision that’s made lightly and they understand the choice they are making. Well, who is really taking the abortion decision lightly? Apparently the pro-abortion folks.

Women deserve better than the choice to kill their own children.

Make the Woman Look Good

Ed

Words of wisdom on the role of a husband from someone I greatly admire. I still have much to learn, it’s a good thing my wife is so patient.

Pastor Eyer

When my wife and I started dance lessons some years ago I remember our dance teacher saying to me, “Your job as a man is to make your wife look good when she dances.” I was taken back by that and wondered to myself, “Why is it my responsibility to make her look good? That’s her job, not mine!” Apart from the fact that I didn’t think I looked all that good myself as a dancer, it seemed a lot to ask of me to take responsibility for making her look good too. I eventually learned that what he was trying to tell me is that I needed to work on over-coming my own flaws in dancing in order for her to recognize and work on hers. When I did, so did she, and we both improved in our dancing and in our relationship together as husband and wife.

Dancing…

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Fifty Shades of Deceptive Grey

Ed

Ezerwoman's Blog

50 shades of greyold fashioned movieIt has been said that good is opposed to evil in such a way that a good thing always eliminates evil as far as it can.

This Valentine’s weekend, we have the opportunity to choose a good thing and, in doing so, help eliminate evil as far as we can. I can promise you that our sons, daughters, and grandchildren will be better for it.

Fifty Shades of Grey, based on the book trilogy, will be showing this weekend in theaters across the country. But, in my hometown (and perhaps in yours), so will the movie Old Fashioned. The contrast between the two is black and white. The one slides into evil. The other strives for what is good.

The contrast, I think, is best illustrated by the leading man in each story. Men fascinate me, perhaps because I believe that God has created them to be the defenders…

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The False Idol of Desiring Healthy Children

Ed

Three parent embryos, that is, embryos with three genetic parents…wait a minute…how can a child have three genetic parents?…what does this mean? The technology is not new, it’s been around for years. What is new is that the British government voted last week to allow this type method to be used on human embryos.

Reading the comments and the letters to the editor in the Telegraph (UK newspaper), you can see the arguments going back and forth: one side says this is a “playing God” while the other side accuses Christians of being “uncaring” towards childless parents or ignorant of science. To (hopefully) clarify things a little, I’ll explain what one of these three embryo processes entails.

The first thing to understand is that in the area surrounding the nucleus of an embryo exists what is called mitochondrial DNA. We’ve long been told that our DNA comes from our mother and our father and that all the genetic material needed to create you was contained in the sperm and the ovum. But there’s more than just the genetic material in the nucleus; we now know that the mitochondrial DNA in the embryo directly affects the DNA in the nucleus, thus, if unhealthy mitochondria is present, then genetic diseases or birth defects will be passed into the nucleus DNA.

So, what’s the technique for creating three parent embryos and why all the brouhaha? You start with the parents’ embryo that has unhealthy mitochondria. In parallel, you get a donor embryo with healthy mitochondria. Obviously, these are all created via in vitro fertilization (IVF), which presents it own set of ethical issues—such as creating more than you need and leaving some in frozen storage (cryopreservation), or rejecting embryos based on a pre-implantation genetic diagnosis that points to a genetic disease being present, or tossing out the embryo that is the “wrong” sex.

In step 2, you remove the nucleus from the parents’ embryo as well as removing the nucleus from the donor embryo. The donor embryo nucleus is destroyed (i.e., killed—a human life is ended). In step 3, you put the parents’ nucleus into the donor’s denucleated embryo. The nucleus continues to develop and you (hopefully) get a healthy baby.

Here’s a simple graphic from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority that shows one way that a three parent embryo can be created.

The process for creating a three parent embryo. Source: Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority

The process for creating a three parent embryo. Source: Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority

Don’t forget that you probably won’t do this to just one embryo because you want to increase the chance of success. Just as in the regular IVF process, multiple three parent embryos will likely be created, and several of them will either be tossed due to genetic deficiencies that crop up after step 3 or kept in limbo through cryopreservation.

In the discussions I’ve seen so far, no one has decried the killing of the donor’s embryo, which is a human life being sacrificed for the idol of having a healthy baby. All the supporters merely point out that either: a) I should be able to have a baby (or a healthy baby) if I want to; or b) why don’t you want to help these poor men and women who can’t have a baby (or a healthy baby). The fact that you have to purposely end a human life in order to have that healthy baby is what’s fundamentally wrong with this procedure. One life is deemed unworthy of life and it is being ended and discarded simply so that another, more “fitting,” life may continue.

Desiring healthy children is not, in and of itself, a false idol. But when we start doing whatever it takes to ensure that we have healthy children, including ending other human life, then it has become an idol.

What does that say about us as a society?

Updated: February 10, 2015 at 11:48 a.m. EST